Astronauts boost space station, fill giant garbage can

Published Sunday, March 18, 2001

CAPE CANAVERAL (AP) -- Space shuttle Discovery's astronauts shoved the international space station into a higher orbit Saturday and finished stuffing trash, dirty laundry and old equipment into a cargo carrier for return to Earth.

''As you can imagine, the space station is a closed volume and we've had a crew of three living up here for some 20 weeks,'' said Andrew Thomas, the astronaut in charge of packing. ''And as is inevitable, a lot of trash and waste is generated.''

Possible computer problems aboard Discovery, meanwhile, had mission managers huddling Saturday night. Computer experts at Mission Control feared the software in the shuttle's main computers may have been corrupted by the astronauts' hasty reactivation of two of the machines earlier in the day.

Even though the computers appeared to be working fine, flight controllers debated whether the software should be reloaded, a lengthy and unprecedented process.

The Italian-made cargo carrier, Leonardo, doubled as a garbage can during Discovery's delivery mission. It was launched aboard Discovery on March 8, attached to space station Alpha on March 12 and then emptied of 5 tons of gear. Astronauts and cosmonauts spent the past few days filling it with more than 1 ton of stuff for return to Earth.

Leonardo was to be detached from the space station early Sunday and mounted back in Discovery's payload bay in preparation for Sunday night's departure of the shuttle.

The really unpleasant waste -- human waste, stored in sealed toilet canisters -- goes into unmanned Russian supply ships. These ships are sent periodically to the space station and, once emptied and refilled with garbage, are jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere.

In addition to packing, the shuttle crew provided another orbital boost for the space station. The pilots fired Discovery's thrusters and raised the joined shuttle and station for the third and final time of the mission.

As a result, Alpha's orbit is almost 10 miles higher than it was when the shuttle arrived one week earlier.

''It's really been a very productive and action-packed flight, and we've got a lot out of it,'' Thomas said.

The 13-day mission is due to end Wednesday with a landing at the Kennedy Space Center.

Discovery is bringing back the three men who had lived aboard the space station since the beginning of November. Last week, Commander Bill Shepherd and his Russian crewmates, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, swapped places with two men and one woman who flew up on the shuttle.

Gidzenko said he was leaving space station Alpha with ''good feelings.''

''We have completed many tasks,'' he said. ''All the systems are working.''